9th July, 2024 in Transport & Industry, Trivia & Gift

Three Million Miles in a Volvo

By Giles Chapman

I love finding out about what motivates people and how the journey of their lives has unfolded. I am nosey and make no apology for it. Mind you, these are things you certainly require as a journalist; an almost manic need to dig away until you get what you need, which is generally a story your readers haven’t heard before.

And I’ve been at it in the car world for some 40 years, writing profiles, interviews and even obituaries on a vast array of people whose lives have been on four wheels. One of the first was an assignment from my first editor to interview a man for our magazine who’d lost his fortune trying to make an affordable sports car in 1950s Britain. No-one had bothered to talk to him about what had happened until I rang out of the blue, and he and his by-then elderly wife welcomed me to their modest home to relay the untold story. They were so generous, and their plight so touching, that, of course, it made a great tale on the page.

It set me off on a working lifetime of tape-recording interviewees to try and get at what really made them tick. Meanwhile, I became heavily involved in writing in-depth historical pieces about enigmatic characters in and around the motor industry, both from the UK and further afield. In a few cases I believe I’ve pieced together definitive accounts that no-one else had attempted; very deep rabbit-holes, for sure, yet also very satisfying.
And then one day, after years and years of all this, I realised I had so much material that a compendium of the best of it could be, once again, something that hadn’t been tried before. Hence this new book, Three Million Miles In A Volvo And Other Curious Car Stories.

The title is a little bit crazy but it’s the only way I could corral my 50 subjects into something cohesive. The theme, really, is that there isn’t one. These are simply the best car-life stories I’ve written on all manner of well- and lesser-known people. I have for you designers and engineers, racing and rally drivers, entrepreneurs and super-salesmen, stunt drivers and oil barons, artists and movie stars. And they’re all pictured along with some of their most interesting achievements. This way, for example, you can read about the never-ending road-trip of the world’s most travelled driver, and see the Volvo he did it in.

It’s a very different book to any other I’ve attempted. All I hope is that readers find these random yet remarkable petrolheads as fascinating to discover as they have been to research and write about.